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The $5 Savings Plan

Saving money isn’t easy – especially when using a debit or credit card to purchase everything. Then, I ran across something called the 5 Dollar Savings Plan on a few other blogs.

The steps are simple:

Every time there is a $5 bill in your wallet, put it in an envelope or jar at home

Once per month (or whenever you wish) deposit the money into a savings account

Keep your deposit receipts to see how much you’ve “saved” at the end of the year

Pretty cool yes? A study from MIT found that subjects paid more when they were instructed to use a credit card rather than cash. In fact, they found that they were willing to spend up to 100% more with plastic. Yikes!

Each $5 bill I get from change from those places I HAVE to stow away at home. Realistically, this gives me about $30 in actual spending money for weekly food purchases

Empty the loose change into my giant coin bank weekly

I started my savings plan Monday and already have $25 in the envelope. Today I ate out for lunch (shhh!) but yesterday I brought a bagged lunch…which is ultimately healthier anyway.

I’m well on my way to saving money! Yay! What do I plan to do with my savings? The coin bank change my fiance and I have been using is to save/spend on our Bachelor/Bachelorette parties in Vegas while the $5 savings plan will be to pay off my CapitalOne credit card. I’ve had nearly the same balance since my sophomore year of college…that’s 8 years. Those jerks and their APR really get you!

I’ll keep you all updated on my progress! In the meantime, what do you do to save money? Have you tried the $5 savings plan?

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3 thoughts on “The $5 Savings Plan”

I recently started using ImpulseSave, so every time I skip Starbucks or hit the gym, I can send a text to “reward” myself with a buck or two in savings. I call it my “visit home for Caroline’s wedding” fund! 🙂 You can also set it up to automatically take any amount from your regular account each week, as a guarantee on a week you might forget to save. It will feel like a bill and not an extra thing you have to do!